Bad layout with grace notes
I discovered this file on a guitar forum.
The insertion of the grace notes in the first two staves causes excessive spacing notes in the middle (in front of the grace notes) od the third staff.
Is this what is known, has already been reported or not? Thanks.
Test file:
1Pastime with good company.mscz
Original file (+ jpeg)
2Pastime_with_good_company.mscz
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| 1Pastime with good company.mscz | 1.75 KB |
| 2Pastime_with_good_company.mscz | 4.3 KB |
| Capture01.jpg | 17.46 KB |
Comments
This isn't limited to grace notes, and it's not necessarily a bug, either. You can see the same thing if, for instance, you create in the top staff a quarter note, eight 32nd notes, and then two quarters. The 32nd notes will take a lot of room, so if you have four quarters in the bottom staff, the spacing is going to be irregular. That's totally normal. The only alternative that would still allow the beats to line up - a basic requirement in notation - would be if MuseScore added that much extra space between the other beats as well. And it is true that in some music this is done. But a lot of people wouldn't want that. So if you would rather have that effect, you can just add the space you want using the Inspector (segment / additional leading space, for example).
That said, an option to do this automatically might be nice. BTW, note that in the case of two sets of beamed notes, you can set the "local relayout" flag on one to cause that set to not respace itself to the other. But that won't apply here.
Thanks for reply. The effect is accentuated by the fact that the contents of the third staff is completely different, with a regular arpeggio of four quarter notes, from start to end. So the spaces between the notes are of a total regularity, as in the extracted part.
![space MuseS.jpg]( "space MuseS.jpg")
![Space Sibelius.jpg]( "Space Sibelius.jpg")
![space Finale.jpg]( "space Finale.jpg")
I looked at the other publishers. In a default score of 32 measures, Sibelius and MuseScore behaves the same way. Finale behaves "better"?
When I tried this in Finale, I found the results depend on what else is going on in that line. If there is enough stuff that it needs to steal space from those quarter notes, it will, and you end up with exactly what MuseScore and Sibelius do.
One thing that would be nice is if MuseScore automatically produced something more like your Finale picture if you add stretch to the measure. But instead, it just keeps the same basic spacing and stretches it out. But this would actually be a pretty major change the current layout algorithm.
There is one case where MuseScore provides an option to defeat the alignment.
http://musescore.org/en/developers-handbook/scrapbook#Local-Relayout
But it applies on beams only. In both cases here, there are no beam involved.
I noted that if you change the stem direction of a grace note (using the X toggle) then it changes the spacing between staves, even if the note is fully contained within the five lines.